GULFSHORE LIFE MAGAZINE: BEYOND COASTAL CONTEMPORARY

When the four-company team behind this four-bedroom, six-bath Pelican Bay home sat down to create their design, they knew they wanted to bring the best of the Gulfshore to the property. That meant a sense of light and airiness, an integration of organic textures and a nod to coastal colors that went beyond traditional shades. At the table were Leslie Sherman, principal owner of Calusa Bay Development, a designer team from Calusa Bay Design, builder Matt Knauf of Knauf-Koenig Group and architect John Cooney of Stofft Cooney Architects.

The 4,617-square-foot home was built around a central great room with an open floor plan that speaks to the updated but casual nature of the house. The designers wanted the space to be both functional and usable for the owners, their family and their guests, and having one great versus separate family and living rooms helped create a sense of flow and open space. Because the major rooms of the home merge into one another, the design team focused on creating individual vignettes and choosing statement pieces that would help define each section. A perfect example: the home’s dining area, which is beautifully set apart from the rest of the room by a wall detail created from contrasting panels of wood and mirror.

ABOVE: This 4,617-square-foot home was built around a central great room with an open floor plan that speaks of the updated, but casual, nature of the house. There is a sense of light airiness about the place, which integrates organic textures with a nod toward coastal colors in non-traditional shades. You feel a sense of flow and of open spaces, which speaks to the functionality of the home.

“With an open floor plan, there’s not really any delineation,” says Randi Scott, Calusa Bay Design’s managing director. “Having this great wall detail gave us the opportunity to say, ‘This is the focal wall for this dining room.’”

The mirrored panels create a stunning luminosity by reflecting the natural light shining through the house while also emphasizing the openness of the design. To increase the dramatic effect, the design team chose a statement-making chandelier from Arteriors created from bent wire and wooden dowels painted white. The chandelier commands the space without feeling overly heavy.

“It has this amazing ambiance to it,” Scott says, “that’s achieved with such simple materials. Though this is the formal dining room, we didn’t want it to feel overwhelming. The chandelier sets that tone—it’s simplistic but different, a piece that has a little touch of character and helps the space all come together as one.”

BELOW: To create a dramatic effect, the design team chose a statement-making chandelier from Arteriors created from bent wire and wooden dowels painted white. The chandelier commands the space and helps to establish the room’s ambiance without feeling overly heavy or overwhelming. Throughout the home, mirrored panels and wall hangings create a stunning luminosity by reflecting the natural light that shines through the house while also emphasizing the openness of the design.

Like the dining area, another stunning vignette in the home is the entrance foyer. Here, the space is created using a Phillip Jeffries wall covering made from all-natural materials and dyed a deep ocean blue.

“It’s not your typical aqua, but it still has this calming natural tone,” says lead designer Liz Brown. “It’s more of a moody color that lends itself to a different kind of coastal feeling.”

The design team decided to add a linear element to this particular space by bringing in the console table from Julian Chichester. The table has an ebony velum top and a rich stained wood base. Again, it’s a piece that doesn’t command the space with too much weight. To heighten the sense of openness, a convex mirror, also from Julian Chichester, sits above the table, offering a widened view of the dining room behind it. The dramatic chandelier above, another statement piece, is made from individual disks of Murano glass. “It’s more of an art piece than a light,” Brown says. “Once again, all of these pieces could speak for themselves, but they come together as a whole.”

In the home’s master bedroom, the design team wanted to create a dramatic effect while still focusing on the idea of striking vignettes. To that end, they chose to create a headboard wall unique to this home using dark-stained millwork pieces and another Phillip Jeffries wall hanging, this one with a slightly metallic background and unexpected color tones. “The hanging incorporates a perfect mauve color you won’t see in a typical Florida home,” says Calusa Bay Development’s Sherman. “We wanted the effect to be rich and dynamic between the dark wood textures, the wall hanging and then the crisp clean bedding.”

The designers chose the organic radial-faced nightstands to compliment the room’s linear elements. One of the many upsides of combining the talents of four separate entities to create a single home is that so much of a house’s unique details can be custom-built, as with the dining area’s mirror and wood paneling wall or the custom-made headboard in the master bedroom. In this Pelican Bay home, the entire kitchen was designed, drawn and labeled through Calusa Bay’s custom cabinetry line.

BELOW: The headboard in the master bedroom is unique to the home. It uses dark-stained millwork pieces and a Phillip Jeffries wall hanging with a slightly metallic background that incorporates unexpected, atypical color tones, such as mauve. “We wanted the effect to be rich and dynamic between the dark wood texture, the wall hanging and then the crisp, clean bedding,” says Calusa Bay Development’s Leslie Sherman.

In this large open kitchen, the team chose to use white painted finishes and brown birch finishes to create warm contrasts, especially between the lighter floor and darker island. That way, the room goes beyond the all-white kitchen to a space with more depth and dimension. The kitchen’s backsplash, made from handmade ceramic subway tiles, reflects a deep coastal blue not typically seen in contemporary Florida homes. With each tile hand-formed and hand-glazed, no two are the same, and the resulting backsplash is rich in character and movement. The effect is reminiscent of rippling water. For the lighting, the design team selected hanging pendants made from opaque glass with reeding details. The reeding provides texture to the pieces, especially when the lights are on. “Every single element in this space – whether it’s counter stools or backsplash or pendants or chandelier — has its own textural element,” Sherman says. “Even though we kept it neutral, we brought in texture and dimension.”

Because so many of the home’s elements are unique and surprising, it’s a challenge to know how to classify it. “This home was outside of the norm, not only for the team but all of Pelican Bay,” says builder Knauff. “From the ceiling details to the finishes and feature walls, and on to the interior design elements, the shift from transitional to adding more contemporary elements was a key ingredient to the home selling for full list price and a new record sale price per square foot.” The house took roughly a year to build and was completed at the end of January 2019. It sold in April for $5,295,000.

Owners Ed and Sharon Campbell moved in soon after purchasing and today are beyond thrilled with their new Calusa Bay property. When considering what drew them to the home, they both agree that it was the totality of the space rather than a single feature. And the ease of transitioning into their new house helped elevate it above others on the market. “It was so beautifully decorated, we could just purchase it and move in shortly thereafter,” Ed says. Sharon agrees. “We’ve done the decorating scene so many times during our marriage that it was very appealing to know we didn’t have to do anything. How often does that happen?” The pair are part-time Naples residents, and they spend the rest of their year in Ohio. It didn’t take them long to decide on the Calusa Bay home. “On our first walk-through, we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, this is it,’” Sharon says. Today, they share their home with their six-month-old Australian shepherd, a blue merle named Finn. “Calusa Bay properties had the vision to build a gorgeous home,” Ed says. “They spared no costs in terms of furnishings and details. I think it was a great success. Hats off to them for building a beautiful house that anybody would love.”

“This home was outside of the norm, not only for the (design) team, but for all of Pelican Bay,” says builder Matt Knauff. “From the ceiling details to the finishes and feature walls and on to the interior design elements, the shift from transitional to adding more contemporary elements was a key ingredient to the home selling for full list price and a new record sale price per square foot.”

Because so many of the home’s elements are unique and surprising, it’s a challenge to know just how to classify it. What drew in owners Ed and Sharon Campbell wasn’t any one of the house’s individual elements, but the totality of the fnished space. “On our first walk-through,” Sharon says, “we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, this is it.’”